I recently dropped my Sony Z5 Compact and the glass on its back splintered. So I bought a new phone. Sony A Z5 Compact for the horrendous amount of 70€. When I bought my last phone everything had to go quick, Cyanogen mod was just announced dead and LineageOS was not ready yet. So I just installed the stock rom and lived with it. This time I wanted to go with a custom Rom and without any Google Apps on it. Here is what i did:

 I installed a pfSense firewall behind my Fritz!Box Router, that does several jobs like VPN, Adblocking, etc. What always bothered me was, that this firewall could be easily bypassed by Wireless clients, because I am using my Fritz!Box as a wireless AP and therefore not physically isolated from the Internet connection. One could just set the Fritz!Box IP as the default gateway and bypass pfSense. If you have ssh access to your Fritz!Box you can fix this! Would you like to know how?

I am currently on vacation and my Hotel offers free WiFi in the lobby. The reception on the third floor, where my room is, is pretty bad on my Thinkpad and my phone doesn't receive anything at all. Fortunately, I am always carrying a high gain USB WiFi stick with me that gave me almost optimal signal strength. Having 2 network cards ((My Thinkpad's internal card (named "Wi-Fi") and the USB card (named "Wi-Fi 2") )) I was able to use my Windows 8.1 machine as a Wireless Repeater (more…)

On 2016-08-01 a law came into force, allowing customers in Germany to use any internet router they want, as long as it meets the providers requirements. On that day I decided to buy a Fritz!Box 6490, for three reasons: 1. I wanted to replace the crappy router my provider gave me (which didn't even have WiFi) 2. besides its routing function, it is able to stream up to 4 concurrent TV programs into the Network 3. it was the only device that fulfilled the above-mentioned requirements. I wanted to setup [Tvheadend](https://tvheadend.org/) to act as an intermediate between clients and the router, because it would allow me to have an EPG, stream the same program to 2 clients, while only occupying a single stream of the Fritz!Box, and allow me to record TV shows. As you can see from the date of this post, it took me one year to figure out how to do it.